Fletis Humplebacker wrote:

"John Harshman"

Fletis Humplebacker wrote:


That isn't in dispute, his reference is the geological record, not a
stop watch. The point is that it was, by all accounts I've seen so far,
sudden. Hense the term "explosion", which was contrary to the traditional
view of evolution.

Clearly there was something sudden going on, if your definition of
"sudden" includes periods of 5 million years.

It does geologically speaking. It would not be sudden if we were
talking about tax rebates.


Right. I'm asking you to keep this in mind. That definition of "sudden"
is not a big problem for standard Darwinian theory.

Sure it is. According to many or most of those who do this
professionally the suddeness is a big problem, hense the theories
that go beyond Darwinian thinking to accomodate it. I've posted
quotes that demonstrate it, your cognitive dissonance doesn't
make them disappear.

You have confused PE with the Cambrian explosion.

I can understand something like the environment favoring birds with
bigger beaks to dominate the breed. I don't think we need to see
such a transition in the fossil record to know it happens. The kinds of
macro-transformations of limbs changing from flippers to legs wouldn't
be so quick that it would leave no trace. I've seen nothing that suggests
a natural transformation like that would happen in 100,000 years.

Indeed it wouldn't. It would probably happen in many steps over millions
of years. And in fact we have transitional fossils for those
intermediate steps in whales, for example. We have good evidence from
both the fossil record and the genetics of living species for the
transformation. Whether it was natural is not something we can test.

Let us know when you come up with some evidence for the transitions.

Gingerich, P. D., M. ul Haq, I. S. Zalmout, I. H. Khan, and M. S.
Malkani. 2001. Origin of whales from early artiodactyls: Hands and feet
of Eocene Protocetidae from Pakistan. Science 293:2239-2242.

Thewissen, J. G. M., E. M. Williams, L. J. Roe, and S. T. Hussain. 2001.
Skeletons of terrestrial cetaceans and the relationship of whales to
artiodactyls. Nature 413: 277-281.

Shedlock, A. M., M. C. Milinkovitch, and N. Okada. 2000. SINE evolution,
missing data, and the origin of whales. Syst. Biol. 49:808-817.

That should do for a start. New fossils and new molecular analyses make
this conclusion stronger every year.


And yes, you are right, we can't test the cause although we can draw
conclusions based on what we know. You believe miracles are natural,
I believe they are supernatural.

Odd way to put it.

All you ever do is back up assertions with more assertions.


You can live in your little insulated world if you like. But don't you
ever feel like a mushroom?

No, I feel freed from the burdens of the fundamentalism that has
enslaved your thinking. I can look at both sides of the issues.

But if all you ever do is look at creationist web sites, how can you
consider that to be more than one side?